Craft London

Agency: Here Design
Project Type: Commercial Work
Client: Stevie Parle and Craft London
Location: London, UK

Making a Mark – Here designs identity and packaging for CRAFT London, a new restaurant, bar and café in Greenwich, London, inspired by everything New British.

Making the news.
Here Design have designed the identity, signage and packaging for CRAFT London, a New British restaurant, bar and café in Greenwich, London, celebrating mark-making as the core uniting design principle. CRAFT London collaborate with world-class craftspeople to roast their coffee, smoke their fish, cure their meats, ferment their vegetables and nurture their contemporary kitchen garden and this close proximity to so many crafts is central to the high quality experience on offer.

The challenge.
The challenge was to create a strong brand identity that would convey New British contemporary craft to a metropolitan audience looking for a high quality food and drink experience, rooted in authentic and thoughtful production processes.

Here’s what we did.
The brand identity had to convey our excitement about craft itself and to do this we chose mark-making as the overall visual expression of this enthusiasm. Expressive mark-making – in all its different guises – reflects the perfect imperfections and idiosyncrasies present in any handmade object made by proud, imaginative craftspeople. Summing up the relationship between head, eyes and hand, mark-making conveys both the presence of the craftsperson and their role in the creation of beautiful experiences, especially here at CRAFT London where craftspeople are central to the audience’s experience.

Using a mixture of pink, turquoise, navy and black, the mark-making reflects the authenticity of each unique CRAFT London experience – whether it’s the café, the restaurant or the bar. The café uses large brush strokes to convey the immediacy of telling stories and sharing ideas; the restaurant required a more definitive approach, so we used the boldness of marker pen; and the bar where paint indicates a delight in time passing. Using mark-making in this way makes the identity highly flexible for future projects and the overall approach works well to compliment the interior design by Tom Dixon’s Design Research Studio.

Here Partner and designer, Caz Hildebrand, says: “Working on CRAFT London allowed us an unusual degree of freedom to make marks unselfconsciously, and simply enjoy using a variety of mediums from paint to charcoal to biro. The flexibility of the branding provides a limitless palette of marks for any and every expression of CRAFT London, from packaging to signage to objects to events.”

Stevie Parle, says: “Working with Here Design is always a pleasure. With their work on CRAFT London they seem to have excelled even their usual high standards. When you work with a design company you hope they’ll get what you’re doing and represent it authentically, Here, have taken what I’m doing and made it a lot better. There’s no one I’d rather work with.”